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From: ral@pyuxqq.UUCP (R A Levenberg)
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: conventions regarding quoted arguments to DOS commands
Message-ID: <715@pyuxqq.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 1-Jun-85 23:41:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyuxqq.715
Posted: Sat Jun  1 23:41:49 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 20:33:46 EDT
Organization: Bell Communications Research, Piscataway, NJ
Lines: 32

DOS seems to behave very differently from the UNIX shell
when it comes to parsing command line arguments.  For example,
the UNIX shell will parse this command line
	sed 's/x/ /g' <file
into 2 arguments,
	sed
	s/x/ /g
The sed command never knows that quotes were used to define the
argument.  The same does not seem to be true in DOS, where I think
the above command would produce these arguments
	sed
	's/x/
	/g'
How, then, does one pass an argument containing delimiters such
as blanks to a DOS command (especially a UNIX command ported to a PC)?

A related question is the evalution of, say, *.c, on a command line.
DOS (actually command.com) will tell the invoked program its argument
is "*.c", whereas the UNIX shell will tell the invoked program its arguments
are, say, main.c, foo.c and bar.c.  Does this mean that DOS programs
use those SYSINT system calls themselves to get first matching file name
and next matching file name whenever an argument contains wild card
characters?

Ron Levenberg, Bell Communications Research
3 Corporate Place
Room 2c-315
Piscataway, NJ 08854

(201) 981-6178
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